Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, is an inspired choice as the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for literature. He has been justly praised by the Swedish foundation for his sensitive treatment of the "clash and interlacing of cultures" as seen from his native Istanbul, where he writes in an apartment overlooking the Bosphorus, the strait that divides both the city and the European continent from Asia. Pamuk's great strength, in acclaimed works such as Snow and My Name is Red, is conjuring up his country's past. This has got him into trouble with his own government, which prosecuted him earlier this year for "insulting Turkishness" because he raised the taboo issues of the Armenian and Kurdish victims of the state Kemal Ataturk founded.

By coincidence this most prestigious award was announced on the very day the French national assembly voted to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915 - a move which has infuriated Ankara and will feed suspicions of European prejudice towards the only Muslim candidate for EU membership. France boasts a large and active Armenian community which lobbied long and hard for recognition of the mass killings by the Ottomans during the first world war and for legislation that mirrors penalties for denial of the Nazi Holocaust.

Supporters of the law are doubtless motivated by a sincere desire to redress a 90-year-old injustice. No one can deny the suffering of Armenians (Hitler once asked scornfully who remembered them) but it does not occupy a place in European history analogous to the racist, industrial-scale extermination of the Jews in Germany, France and elsewhere, where Holocaust denial has been a crime for many years. Furthermore, some in France are quite clearly exploiting the issue to prevent Turkey getting into the EU, despite Jacques Chirac's formal commitment to see it in the club.

There was an ironic twist to yesterday's news. Pamuk was prosecuted under article 301 of the Turkish penal code, the use of which is encouraged by rightwing nationalists who complain that Europe is undermining the country's identity, and which must go if Turkey is to join the EU. But it is hypocritical of Europe to demand that Turkey modernise its laws when France is moving in precisely the opposite - illiberal - direction. Pamuk's world-class achievement should be a source of pride - a compliment, not an insult - to a sometimes oversensitive nation. Turks would do well to ponder its significance and try to look back at their history with a more open mind.